Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Whenever I follow a link on the web and it becomes apparent that I am being sent to a PDF file, my heart sinks. That isn't to saythat I have anything against PDF as a format. In fact, it's a great idea: a portable way to share documents in such a way that the reader sees exactly what the auther intended them to. No problems there.

No, the problem is AbobeAcrobat Reader, which now takes an age to load. How long? Too long. Most web pages load within a second so if Acrobat Reader wants to take 10 seconds to load up, that's at least 9 seconds too long. The sad thing is that it used to be much faster many years ago but it seems like every release has been slower than the last. It would be easier to swallow if the slowness was the price that you pay for tons of useful new features but there don't seem to be any, at least, not any that I care about.

I tried Foxit Reader a while back and it was much faster. Unfortunately, I found that there were quite a few PDF documents that it could not cope with so I'm back to Acrobat. Sigh.

My sincere hope is that either Adobe sort themselves out or that someone else makes a PDF reader that doesn't suck.